Treat the standard as something earned again every day rather than inherited from the brand's reputation, and build it into enough senior people that it travels with them. Expansion that outruns the supply of people formed in the standard will produce a second property that never reaches the first.
The brand is the standard, repeated daily, until the market recognizes it and pays for it. That was the working definition I heard from the operators who had protected a standard across years and multiple properties, and it explains why expansion is so dangerous. Expansion multiplies the places where the standard has to be repeated, and it does so faster than it multiplies the people capable of repeating it.
Gerrit Graef, then general manager of The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh, put the stakes in the plainest commercial terms. A hotel that is selling rooms is selling a commodity, and commodities are graded on price.
“If The Ritz-Carlton was merely a hotel, our guests would find the same product for less elsewhere.” Gerrit Graef, then general manager of The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh
What the guest is paying for is an experience they cannot get elsewhere, and that experience is produced by people rather than by the name over the door. When a brand expands, the question is never whether the signage can be reproduced. It is whether the standard behind it can be.
The first protection is a particular attitude toward reputation. Eneko Atxa of Azurmendi in Larrabetzu, Spain, holds three Michelin stars and describes a daily practice that treats them as something not yet earned.
“We must feel naked of prestige, and we must earn that respect anew.” Eneko Atxa, chef, Azurmendi, Larrabetzu
The kitchen leaning on yesterday’s stars is the kitchen that has stopped earning today’s. The posture matters doubly in an expanding brand, because a new property opens with the parent’s reputation attached and none of the parent’s track record. A team that believes the brand name carries the standard will coast from the first day. A team that believes the standard has to be earned again each morning will build it.
The second protection is how the standard is held in people. The properties whose identity outlasts any single leader are the ones where multiple senior people each carry the standard in their own practice, formed by long enough daily exposure to it that the formation took. That is also the only supply line an expansion can draw on. A second property staffed by people who learned the standard from a manual will approximate it. A second property led by people who were formed in the original will reproduce it. The pace of expansion is therefore set by the pace at which the brand can form senior people, and a brand that expands faster than that is spending its standard rather than extending it.
The third protection is restraint about what changes. Atxa’s kitchen evolves constantly, but in small increments, and with a rule that the things already brought to a standard worth protecting are not disturbed in the name of progress. Kwong Wai Keung of T’ang Court at The Langham, Hong Kong, bounds the kitchen’s evolution by Cantonese tradition and keeps the tradition alive through daily practice. In an expanding brand, this means knowing precisely which elements are the identity and which are local adaptation. The first list is short, and it is not open for negotiation at the new property.
Sjefke Jansen, then general manager of Belmond Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg, spent his years there protecting the property’s distinctly Russian character against the pull to internationalize. That is the test for any brand with more than one address: whether each property can serve its guests fully without becoming interchangeable with the one across the street.
Chapter 11, Staying True, develops the argument through brand as substance, evolving without eroding, and the question of whether an identity survives beyond its founder.